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MooGNU (a copyleft alternative to copyrighted Nyancat)
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On 7/30/2012 the Free software desktop project MATE released version 1.4 to the public. Among the changes made in this release included the removal of the popular internet image 'Nyancat' that had previously been included in it. This change came about due to concerns by the developers with regard to its copyright status.

In response to this change, anonymous posters on the 4chan technology image board /g/ autonomously decided to collectively collaborate on a Copyleft alternative to offer as a replacement to the copyrighted Nyancat. In fleshing out what form it should take many ideas were proposed and the resulting image that eventually developed was a running GNU (mascot of the Free Software Foundation) whose body consisted of a piece of peanut butter toast (in tribute to the open nature of George Washington Carver) and featured an artifical rainbow trailing it. After many suggestions for a name a consensus eventually settled around MooGNU (a combination of the sound Gnus make {subjective} and GNU for the GNU project)

To further complement this resulting collaborative image, /g/ posters also worked to incorporate it into a fully animated Ogg video which could also be freely adapted and shared. This eventually resulted in many Free culture .gifs featuring MooGNU as centerpiece and several musical interpretations of the Free Software Song (one with a computerized voice declaring 'gnu,gnu,gnu' & a chiptune/8bit version). From these efforts, two similar but distinct animations were produced: a Ogv version (http://archive.org/details/M00GNU) and a HTML5 version (http://is.gd/VWQH8t). Upon completion of these two works, the adoption of the CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported Licence was collectively decided upon for all works produced and MooGNU was submitted upstream on github for approval & was accepted by MATE founder Perberos.


As per the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, anyone is free to remix/share MooGNU and the source-files for everything can be found in the HTTP link below under 'MooGNU! (CC-BY-SA-3point0).zip'

Happy hacking!


This movie is part of the collection: Community Video

Producer: /g/
Audio/Visual: sound, color
Keywords: 2012; July; collaboration; mutual collaboration; Creative Commons; anonymity; Free Software; GNU/Linux; GNU; GNU Project; Free Software Song; 8bit; chiptune; peanut butter; rainbow; George Washington Carver; fork; MATE; Gnome2; GIMP; KolourPaint; Gentoo; Debian; Internet Archive; Notepad++; github; Linux kernel; Linus Torvalds; Ogg; Four Freedoms; FSF; Free Software Foundation; Richard Stallman; RMS; Etienne Suvasa; Peter Gerwinski; Wikipedia; wildebeest; Grav-mass; /g/; anonymous collaborative effort; CC-BY-SA-3.0; happy hacking; /g/entoomen;

Creative Commons license: Attribution-Share Alike 3.0

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